L-Soft Disaster Recovery Plan for ListPlex

L-Soft has a disaster recovery plan in the event of a significant disruption to ListPlex. A significant disruption may include a significant disruption for the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The plan outlines the key recovery steps to be performed during and after a disruption so that normal operations can be restored as soon as possible.

Technical recovery will be performed only in the event of a significant disruption. In the event of a disaster, the following customers will be given priority for recovery at the secondary site:

After primary site IP addresses have been relocated to the disaster recovery site

The specific disaster recovery objectives are to:

Immediately mobilize a core group to assess the technical ramifications of a disruption

Set technical priorities for the recovery team

Minimize the impact of the disruption to the impacted features and priority customers (dedicated VM)

Stage the restoration of operations at the secondary site to full processing capabilities

Enable rollback operations once the disruption has been resolved

There are significant dependencies between and supporting technical groups within and outside L-Soft. This plan is to coordinate with customers to enable their own recovery. The plan is not intended to outline all the steps or recovery procedures that customers need to take in the event of a disruption, or in the recovery from a disruption.

The overall DR strategy of L-Soft International, Inc. is summarized in the table below. These scenarios and strategies are consistent across the technical layers (user interface, reporting, etc.)

A disaster recovery event can be broken out into three phases, the response, the resumption and the restoration.

Response Phase: The immediate actions following a significant event

On call personnel paged

Decision made around recovery strategy to be taken

Full recovery team identified

For a short outage, priority customers are contacted and will decide if they want to recover or wait

Resumption Phase: Activities necessary to resume services after team has been notified

Recovery procedures implemented

Coordination with other departments executed as needed

Restoration Phase: Tasks taken to restore service to previous levels

Rollback procedures implemented

Operations restored

Response Phase

The following are the activities, parties and items necessary for a disaster recovery response in this phase.

Step

Components

Identify issue, page on call/designated responsible individual

Issue communicated/escalated

Priority set

Identify the team members needed for recovery

Selection of core team members required for restoration phase from among the following groups:

Operations

Technical Support

Communicate the specific recovery roles and determine which recovery strategy will be pursued

Documentation/tracking of timelines and next decisions

Estimation of the duration of the primary site outage based on preliminary analysis

Contact priority customers (based on customer's SLA) to decide if customer wants failover to secondary site

Resumption Phase

During the resumption phase, the steps taken to enable recovery will vary based on the type and duration of the issue. If decision is made to monitor primary site recovery only, then the disaster recovery team will:

Track progress of primary site recovery

Recalculate estimated completion based on current progress

Send periodic updates to core stakeholders

Otherwise, the disaster recovery team will execute the following steps:

Step

Components

Initiate Failover

Restoration procedures identified

Risks assessed for each procedure

Coordination points between groups defined

Issue communication process and triage efforts established

Complete Recovery

Recovery executed, including handoffs between key dependencies

Test Recovery

Tests assigned and performed

Results summarized and communicated to group

Failover deemed successful

Communication sent to priority stakeholders

New Bethesda IP address identified

Customer asked to change its DNS

Restoration Phase

During the restoration phase, the disaster recovery team will execute the following steps:

Step

Components

Determine when failback to original data center will be pursued

Restoration procedures determined

Original data center restored

Schedule determined

Complete Failback

Failback steps executed, including handoffs between key dependencies

Test Failback

Tests assigned and performed

Results summarized and communicated to group

Issues (if any) communicated to group

Determine whether failback was successful

Declaration of successful failback and communication to priority stakeholders to restore original DNS entries